African author takes English foreign fiction award

A book about Angola, translated from Portuguese, and a novel by a French author who has been dead for 60 years, have been honoured by the Independent Foreign Fiction prize.

José Eduardo Agualusa is the first African to win the Arts Council sponsored prize. His The Book of Chameleons, translated by Daniel Hahn, was awarded the £10,000 prize for its "witty originality and profound humanity". The book, which is set in contemporary Angola, tackles the subject of memory, and the shifting nature of truth, through the medium of an unusual narrator - a lizard. The translation, which was praised by the judges as "captivating", retains the poetic cadences of the Portuguese original.

Boyd Tonkin, the literary editor of the Independent, and one of the judges, described the book as "a delightful, moving and revealing novel about modern Africa, about memory, grief and the endurance of hope."

José Eduardo Agualusa, who was born in Angola and now splits his time between Lisbon and Luanda, is the author of six novels as well as a couple of volumes of investigative reporting. The first African to win the prize, he beat a strong field; the shortlist included The Story of Blanche and Marie by Per Olov Enquist, Your Face Tomorrow 2: Dance and Dream by Javier Marías and Shyness and Dignity by Dag Solstad.

The annual award, which was revived in 2001 after running from 1990-95, celebrates English translations. The £10,000 prize money is shared between authors and their translators. Previous winners include WG Sebald, Orhan Paumuk and the translator Anne Born.

Unusually this year, the judges also issued a special commendation. While the award is only eligible for living authors, the panel wanted to salute Suite Française by Irène Némirovsky, translated from the French by Sandra Smith. The manuscript of the novel was first discovered almost 60 years after the author's death in Auschwitz in 1942. The book caused a storm when it was first published in France, in 2004. It was hailed by critics as a masterpiece and the international rights sold in 18 countries for large sums. The book was intended to be the first two parts of an epic, and this week Chatto, who publish the book in the UK, acquired four more Némirovsky novels. The manuscripts to the works were in a small suitcase grabbed by Némirovsky's 13-year-old daughter when she went into hiding after her mother was arrested by the gendarmerie and sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau.

"All the time we were in that village, I just remember mother writing, writing, writing," Denise, now in her 70s, told the Guardian's Jon Henley when the book was first published in 2004. "It was as if she knew she was writing against time. Indeed, reading between the lines, her notes show she knew full well that if ever her final work was published, it would be posthumously."